Abstract for Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin & Ion Giurgean's talk

Structuring silence: Processing VP ellipsis
Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin & Ion Giurgean (Paris)
March 3, 2005 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

Romanian synthetic genitives are like English Saxon genitives insofar as they impose a strict constraint on the determiner of the head N: in English it must be empty, and in Romanian it must be filled with a suffixal definite article. According to Dobrovie-Sorin (2000, 2002), this constraint can be explained as follows: (a) in both languages, synthetic genitives occupy the Spec, Nmax position; (b) the semantic composition of (Spec, Nmax) is incompatible with the rule of semantic composition characteristic of canonical Determiners.

Although the proposed semantic analysis could well be adequate, the details of Dobrovie-Sorin?fs (2000, 2002) syntactic analysis are problematic on both conceptual and empirical grounds. (1) Resuming herself to postnominal synthetic genitives, Dobrovie-Sorin proposed that they should be located in a right-hand Specifier position. (2) In order to account for the adjacency constraint to which postnominal synthetic genitives are subject, Dobrovie-Sorin was led to assume that all adnominal constituents following a definite noun are DP-adjuncts. The assumption in (2) will be shown to be empirically incorrect in Romanian. As to (1), besides its obvious conceptual disadvantages, it is also empirically problematic if we want to propose a unified analysis for post-nominal and pre-nominal genitives (the latter were not taken into consideration by Dobrovie-Sorin (2000, 2002). We will try here to modify the analysis so that it could face these problems, while maintaining the assumptions stated in (a) and (b) above. We will also argue against Dobrovie-Sorin?fs proposal that the DP-level of representation is absent from N-projections embedding Specifier positions. Correlatively, the rule of N-to-Det will be shown to play a decisive role.